1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device provided for disinfecting, sterilizing and/or maintaining medical instruments. More particularly, the device should be used to prepare dental instruments.
2. Related Technology
Medical or dental handpieces are tubular parts that the medical practitioner grips as a handle sleeve during the treatment. A handpiece usually used in dental practice is a so-called drill handpiece, which carries a treatment tool, more particularly a drill, at its front end and the back end of which is coupled to a supply tube by means of a coupling. Feed lines for energy for driving the treatment instrument and fluid lines for treatment media, e.g. air and/or water, extend through the handpiece. A distinction is often made between so-called turbine handpieces, in which pressurized air is provided for feeding a turbine arranged in the front end region, and so-called motor handpieces, which have an electric motor as a drive unit.
In order to maintain the function of the handpieces, maintenance is required from time to time, particularly for the rotatably mounted drive elements. Furthermore, the ever more stringent hygienic requirements in dental practice lead to handpieces having to be prepared at regular time intervals. The successful preparation and maintenance of the appropriate requirements must be recorded in full by the dentist; this entails not insignificant personal and organizational effort.
Until now, dental handpieces were manually reprocessed by the instruments firstly being spray-disinfected after use on the patient and being externally washed. By contrast, in general the interior of the instruments was not cleaned. However, in the meantime cleaning and disinfection devices are commercially available, in which the instruments are prepared, before they are subjected to oil care. Machine preparation has significant advantages over manual maintenance of the instruments since only machine methods allow safe and reproducible cleaning and maintenance.
However, the devices known up until now can generally only be used for individual preparation steps, and so cleaning, maintenance and sterilization have to be carried out separately in each case. The totality of the devices required for this takes up a relatively large amount of space, with each device respectively requiring electric, pneumatic and fluidic connections. Accordingly, the implementation of a complete machine preparation of dental instruments by means of individual devices is very awkward and connected with great expense.
A further disadvantage consists of the fact that the individual devices generally are not interconnected, which is why there cannot be data interchange between the devices. This in turn leads to more overheads for the operating staff because it is not possible to create a continuous automatic documentation of the instrument preparation. Furthermore, the instruments have to be conveyed manually from device to device in intermediate steps, which entails intensive employment of staff and requires much time.